We don't always like being nonplussed

Thursday, August 2, 2012

Not too bad. My Super Special Murder Team is doing its job admirably. We'll see how they do against the bosses. We do a lot of fighting in practically every area of the map. Meanwhile, Kamui liberates Nova Scotia. Well, we had Annapolis, so why not?

Fighting. So much fighting. ALL OF THE FIGHTING. Norn's doing pretty well, though, and everyone else is holding, though Lanselot is having some difficulty holding the town closest to the base. FLAIL's left the base to Debonair, who should be able to manage. If he doesn't we'll boot somebody else back. Lots of interesting drops though- an instant level-up item, a Love And Peace...

But the time for Love and Peace is over. Here we go. Boss Number One is Gares!

Oops, didn't capture before I killed all his Skeletons. There were Skeletons, by the way. He's done.

And there's Rashidi! Such an unassuming, humbly-dressed fellow. Tristan reads him the Zenobian Riot Act for all the harm he's done, and then the battle begins again.

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and assume this one will be difficult. Holding the World for the last boss, but I do play Priestess to heal my wounds. We've got the attacks to end it- every front-rower has 4 attacks, as does Saradin, and Norn has 3. ...then Rashidi casts Thunder Flare and we change our mind about the World! And we kill his ass.

He speechifies for a bit, and then summons the great Ogre Diablo! His head and hands each have 400+ HP. We pull Jokers until we get the World again- it takes about FORTY -and the battle is joined.

Call it a hunch, but I think this one is the tough one. In order, we play: World, Strength, Star, Hanged Man, and Judgment.

And now, the ending:

FUCK YEAH THE WORLD. The best ending!

Man, the music during the dialogue parts really sounded like there should be dancing Ewoks.

So in the end, I have to say that if you're going to play Ogre Battle then English is the best way to go. The Playstation version of Ogre Battle has a few advantages over the SNES version, though it adds load times to the mix. Both are quite good, get whichever suits you. It's an incredibly complex game, and knowing what to do can be hard enough the first time through if you actually know what's going on. But, it's absolutely worth it. It's not quite like any other game, and its sequels and imitators never quite touch it, even when they do try as with Ogre Battle 64. Though Tactics Ogre is in and of itself an excellent, excellent game, it's another animal altogether.

Yasumi Matsuno, after a long and fruitful tenure at Squaresoft/Square-Enix, is now at Level 5, about to release an odd-sounding little minigame as part of a 3DS cart called Guild-01. I SO hope it makes it out here. There's nobody else in the business who does what he does, and Ogre Battle is one of his early greats. Like I said, it's better played in English, but it's entertaining to play in Japanese, if for no other reason than to see what names were changed to protect the innocent.